New Years Eve Lasagna

New Years Eve Lasagna

Food humorist/writer/poet extraordinaire, Calvin Trillin, single-handedly launched a campaign to make spaghetti carbonara the national dish for Thanksgiving. I first learned of his coup attempt to unseat the roasted turkey as America's thanksgiving day centerpiece when I read the story in a passage in the New York City Cookbook. A few years later, I listened to it when National Public Radio aired the story.

In the essay, Calvin Trillin begins his amusing if not logical argument citing, "It does not take much historical research to uncover the fact that nobody knows if the Pilgrims really ate turkey at the first Thanksgiving dinner". Here's a link to the rest of the story to see where he goes with his argument.

This year, New Year's Eve fell on a Wednesday and other than the occasional barrage of fireworks and celebratory gunfire from the next block over, it felt like any other uneventful midweek day. I couldn't come up with a good justification for having lasagna but I thought, nobody needs an excuse to eat lasagna, after all, it's lasagna. So that's what we had, New Year's Eve lasagna in homage to Calvin Trillin's Thanksgiving spaghetti carbonara.

Here's a short sampling of the dry wit of Calvin Trillin.